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An engineer, professor, capitalist and entrepreneur, Dr.
Ivan Sutherland is a true pioneer of user interface design. From a
very young age Ivan Sutherland took an interest in computers, being one of
the first high school students in his time to write a computer program.
He later became an electrical engineer and is now a valuable member of the
innovative Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sutherland has been involved in
numerous projects but he is most famous for his doctoral thesis:
"Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical Communications System".
Sutherland used a "lightpen" to create engineering drawings directly on the
screen. Sketchpad had the ability to create perfect lines and corners
as well as a function to zoom in and out. Long before Microsoft
Windows, Apple Macintosh or even the Xerox Star, Sutherland pioneered the
first graphical user interface (GUI) before the term was conceived. |
